Balancing personal aspirations, family expectations and job matching: “migratory career” re-construction among highly educated migrant women in the Basque Country.

International migration is a complex phenomenon in which individuals face a decision-making process based on different determinants at personal, relational and professional levels. Aspirations are crucial in this process, but they cannot be separated from structural and relational factors, which produce different impacts and mark bifurcations for each person on the move. Personal aspirations and professional expectations are crucial for shaping the migratory process. Scholars claim that migratory aspirations are linked not only to socioeconomic and political factors related to the expectations of better life and job opportunities in the host country society, but geographical imaginaries linked to the place of immigration. Among women, the sentimental imaginaries of their partners’ countries of residence seem to play a key role (Riaño, 2016). In this respect, “migration, in the broadest sense, is much more than mere movement between places; it is always embedded in wider processes of meaning-making” (Salazar, 2010, p. 6). Therefore, professional expectations of job matching are also crucial in shaping highly educated women’s migratory careers. Precisely for this reason, “the relationship between qualifications, policies and local labour market dynamics is thus central for defining the value of immigrants in this context” (Hercog & Sandoz, 2018, p. 455), which has generated the unsolved dilemma between highly skilled and highly educated conceptualisation and problematisation.